2014年12月24日水曜日

Google is a big supporter of Code for America and we've invited their co-founder Jennifer Pahlka to do an interview with Stephanie Hannon for the Women TechMaker program.

"Coder and activist Jennifer Pahlka believes that apps, built quickly and cheaply, are a powerful new way to connect citizens to their governments. Google's Steph Hannon chats about the future of Code for America and how to get involved."﻿

We've also invited her to do a Techtalk at Google campus, and this is the video.

"Jennifer Pahlka is the founder and executive director of Code for America. She recently served as the US Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She is known for her TED talk, Coding a Better Government, and the recipient of several awards, including MIT’s Kevin Lynch Award, the Oxford Internet Institute’s Internet and Society Award, and the National Democratic Institute’s Democracy Award. She spent eight years at CMP Media, where she ran the Game Developers Conference, Game Developer magazine, Gamasutra.com, and the Independent Games Festival. Previously, she ran the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 events for TechWeb, in conjunction with O’Reilly Media. She is a graduate of Yale University and lives in Oakland, Calif. with her daughter, her fiance, and seven chickens.

Can government be run like the Internet, permissionless and open? Coder and activist Jennifer Pahlka believes it can — and that apps, built quickly and cheaply, are a powerful new way to connect citizens to their governments — and their neighbors."

Julia Kloiber works at Open Knowledge Foundation and is the project lead for Code for Germany, which she describes in her recent TED talk "Let's build better digital tools for our cities!"

"When it came to getting public consensus on a complex plan to convert the epic Tempelhof Airport into something new, Berlin sought an effective way to communicate the nuances of the various proposals. The solution? A computer coder synthesized the information from all the options into a simple infographic, leading to an informed vote by the public. Julia Kloiber argues for the release of government data so coders can unscramble it for the public good - in Berlin and beyond."

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer. -Fumi Yamazaki

2014年11月24日月曜日

"Question authority and think for yourself: You don't get Nobel prize for doing what you are told- you get Nobel prize for questioning authority and thinking for yourself. But somehow, we made this education system that requires you to have the right answer, to be obedient and to do things the way everybody else does them because it's the way you're supposed to do it."

"Fragile is a something that breaks under stress, and not robust against chaos. But robustness and resilience is not the opposite of fragile, because robustness and resiliency survives chaos. "Antifragile" are things that gets stronger when there's stress or are attacked. For example immune system gets smarter and stronger when they get attacked. Network security is another one. Think about "Antifragile" applied to all the systems including governments, education... the world is complex, stressful, and if you try to eliminate all rebellion and all the stress, you come up with a relatively fragile system."

"Learning over education: Education is something people do to you, learning is what you do to yourself. We need creative learning: In the old days, mass production, post industrial, pre-robot, pre-AI ages, you needed people who are obedient, could do repetitive task, weren't rebellious. But now, people should be more creative, because creative things are what the computers can't do. All the repetitive jobs are going to be taken over by computers."

"4Ps of Creative Learning = Projects, Peers, Passion and Play. Learning out of context doesn't work- learning through doing something you can learn, hence projects are important. Peers: teaching each other is a great way to learn. Passion is important. Play: if you put pressure on somebody and give financial rewards, they will do simple tasks more efficiently but it will take longer to do creative tasks. We're used to pressure people to be on time and be obedient that we have stamped out creativity on the kids. Unless we can transform our children, education system and workforce to a more rebellious and robust system, we will lose our jobs to computers and robots, and it's the only way we can survive."

Japan is a country that grew lots of people who are obedient, can't say no, and aren't allowed to say no in schools and workplaces. "Too tall a pile is hit on the top."

On the other hand, Japan is the country that is full of high quality amateur creativity in the fields of music, art, illustration and cartoons, animations, novels, software, hardware and many more fields in art. The amount of creativity that you see in places like Comic Market and Maker Faire Tokyo are just amazing. Of course many commercial products are exported out of the country, but the layers and layers of amateur creativity flourishing in places that are not mass production. I feel a lot of potential and hope for those creativity to lead to next generation industries.... from the awesome Japanese "rebellions" :)

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer. -Fumi Yamazaki

2014年11月18日火曜日

I've supported Kickstarter for this project and saw it when it was released, but I realized they now have subtitles in English, Spanish, Russian, French, Italian, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese. More reason for everyone in the world to watch this video.... and think about what you can do, what we can do, to make the world a better place. The world lost Aaron. We have to continue what he wanted to make happen.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer. -Fumi Yamazaki

2014年11月4日火曜日

My favorite is this project by Mark Headd former Chief Data Officer of Philadelphia where they did a GitHub-based procurement - "Redesigning Government".

Let's look at the problem: that the government procurement is broken, "fear-based procurement" is taking place, meaning people working in the government in general doesn't want to take risks so they stick to less risky procurement process, with old-style vendors they know, and the newer innovative startups has no way to contribute.

In the case of Philadelphia, they used GitHub for procurement for the following reasons:
1) They wanted to use a platform that would resonate with technologists, and wanted to work with firms that believed in what they believed- "we value open source software, we value collaborative software development, we value awesome things, and existing procurement processes don't allow us to find firms that share our values" says Mike.
2) They wanted to have some insight into the quality of other work done by bidders (to be able to look at their public repos to see what kind of solutions they were working on and how active they were in participating in other projects)
3) They wanted to see creative responses - something that potential vendors probably had not seen from a city government before.

The project they decided to use this process was called myPhillyRising, and they posted their RFP (what they want to build) on GitHub Gist.

Anybody can see it, anybody can ask question or clarification can post public comment on this Gist so that everyone will see those questions and everyone will see those answers. If vendors wanted to bid, they had to create a GitHub repository, and the proposals should be in that repository. Mark and the team used GitHub issues to evaluate the vendor proposals, tagged them and issued bugs to assign the evaluation processes to the team.

Some firms just put a pdf document on their repository, some of them submitted actual code as submission, and the city can install and test them. Another vendor submitted a website that had user stories. Changing the "deign of the procurement process" itself allowed the city to reach those creative firms with shared values.

It talks about how the cities opened their RFPs to everyone to be inclusive to the local citizens, and not specifying the solutions they are looking for but specifying the problems they want to solve made bidders more creative: “If we think about procurement as less about buying solutions and more about solving problems, I think we can open ourselves up to a whole variety of innovations”

And they introduce at tweet of a woman reading the RFP over breakfast: “Suddenly, procurement has gone from something completely horrible to something people can imagine participating in.”

Example from Namie, Fukushima

I wrote about Namie in the past on this blog post: it's a town very near Fukushima nuclear power plant, over 37% of the population is over 60 years old, all of the citizens are in evacuation in other places due to the radiation, and the town is completely in a diaspora. Namie is a small town with around 10,000 households/ 20,000+ citizens, and the town decided to distribute each household a tablet to communicate among each other as well as the town to distribute information. The project has 290,000,000 yen (approx. 2,900,000 USD) as the budget, from the Recovery Agency.

With such aging society, inclusion is extremely important. Here is how they are running the procurement process, together with Code for Namie team.

They have this website that explains to the citizens what this project is about, and the process of procurement.

1. They ran 6 ideathons where citizens, developers and designers gathered to discuss ideas for what they want the tablet to be doing in order for it to be useful for them.
2. They summarized the ideas to select the theme for hackathon.
3. They ran 2 sets of 2-day hackathons to develop prototype apps, and had the citizens evaluate those apps.
4. Based on those evaluations by the citizens, the town created RFP and invited vendors to submit proposals for creating applications and running the distribution and operation of the project.
5. All of the households receive application form to apply for the tablet, and monitor households will be able to start using the test device. Events to experience the tablet will be held.
6. Based on the monitor and events, adjustments will be made, and the tablets will be distributed.

1. Community leaders, old couple living in temporary housing in Fukushima City
2. Community creators, young mom & daughter in Chiba, with high IT literacy
3. Old man living alone in Nihonmatsu, enjoying single life
4. Family living in Sendai, adjusting their lifestyle based on the children
5. "SOS" type- evacuated to Saitama, but cannot adjust to the locals and having trouble with communication

There were 6 companies that made proposals, all of the proposals can be seen here: the presentation files and video of their actual presentation to the town. You can see all of the scores, overall evaluations and detailed evaluations here. It is extremely transparent.

Watching the video archive, you realize that at the beginning of the presentation, the vendors are told "citizens from Namie are in the room listening, so please do not use technical terms- please make your presentations understandable to everyone." One of the vendors started using lots of jargons in their Q&A and one of the person from the audience replied "I did not understand a word you said. Can you explain in plain sentences?"

Also, there is one person in the room that keeps asking the same question to the vendors: "Do you know the percentage of the population of Namie over 60 years old?" and "Do you know what percentage of the citizens have evacuated outside Fukushima?" These information were all in the first couple of pages in the RFP, but surprisingly some of them could not answer.

So the first question would be "Why the heck is NTT Docomo's score so low??" NTT Docomo is the largest mobile carrier in Japan, and clearly should have done lots of app development and system integration projects like this. They actually have a lot of experience- in fact, they already have ASP service that has many of the functions needed in Namie, and have already implemented in other town in Fukushima, that they can leverage. Their proposal was basically using this ASP service, customizing to Namie. At first thought, this makes sense, and their presentation seems legit. Instead of reinventing the wheel, let's use existing apps and customize it. What they did NOT realize is that this project was supposed to be agile, collaboration project involving the citizens to prototype, iterate, test, and give the feedback loops for further iteration, although it was written clearly in the RFP. It was not meant to be "giving" the system, but "building together". Also, the citizens did research about how Docomo's similar system in other town of Fukushima was doing, and it was not functioning well. Despite using the existing system, their initial cost and operational cost was expensive.

To summarize, almost all of the steps of the procurement is open, and citizens are inclusive of that process through the following steps:
1. Citizens were involved in shaping the RFP by giving ideas of "what they need".
2. Citizens were involved in hackathons to give feedbacks to the prototypes created.
3. Citizens were involved in evaluation of the vendors by joining and asking questions at their presentation.
4. Citizens will be involved in using the app early as monitors, join "experiencing events" to give feedbacks for iteration before the final rollout.

Sure, they didn't use GitHub, all of their docs are in pdf format, but I think it is subtle in this case: this is about a small and aging town, with all of their citizens in diaspora, almost nobody is tech-savvy and they have little experience developing systems or apps, but they are working together with the citizens to build something useful for their communication and knowledge sharing which is essential to their future.

Getting the government procurement right, together

Hopefully, those various examples of "changes to government procurement process" will help make more success cases to government procurement projects- according to a research, "94% of large federal information technology projects over the past 10 years were unsuccessful — more than half were delayed, over budget, or didn’t meet user expectations, and 41.4% failed completely".

Adding Leap input to change the pitch of the sound, configured in Max.

Result:We've got 3 levels of thresholds for light sensor, with frog sound and nature sound (as a lullaby to put you into sleep...), with additional strong light from flashlight app of Android we'll get a cat's meow sound (to wake you up), with flex sensor we'll get a rooster sound (if you were not waken up by the cat) and with Leap motion we can make that rooster sound changed to a digital squeak (to wake up the zombies).

[photo by Hackbright Academy]

It was not my first time playing with Arduino and Leap Motion, but my first time using Max. We had 2 experts on our team so they were able to figure out many things on the fly- I think I should get back to the elementary level and try out using it a bit more. Many thanks to the team for helping me learn!

[photo by Hackbright Academy]

Photos from the event:

Women building things!

Demos!

Note from TechTalk:

There are lots of cool events happening all around the world!

Nodebot is a global community of developers working on robots powered by JavaScript.

Nodecopter is an event with developers making something with AR Drone & Javascript

- Government was our original means of collective action. It was built to do things that none of us could do individually. It’s wonderful to work together.

- Q: Technology will take away government people's jobs?
A: Redeploy people to focus on outcome and actual people, don't get rid of them.

- Looking back on how Open Government advocacy started- it started by showing off people who are doing great things in the government, celebrate, and tell stories. Then, others who saw it will start doing it. That's how movements starts. That's how Tim started Open Source movement and other movements.

- 18F is deployment and USDS (US Digital Service) is about strategy and oversight. UK's GDS (Government Digital Service) actually does both. Government realized they must spend less time just talking and more getting shit done ;)

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer. -Fumi Yamazaki

There are many guides and best practices learned from those cities, to publishing open data that countries/states/cities. Summary and links below for those interested!Open Data Policy Guidelines by Sunlight Foundationhttp://sunlightfoundation.com/opendataguidelines/(CC-BY Sunlight Foundation)What Data Should Be Public

Proactively Release Government Information Online

Reference And Build On Existing Public Accountability And Access Policies

Build On The Values, Goals And Mission Of The Community And Government

Create A Public, Comprehensive List Of All Information Holdings

Specify Methods Of Determining The Prioritization Of Data Release

Stipulate That Provisions Apply To Contractors Or Quasi-Governmental Agencies

Appropriately Safeguard Sensitive Information

How to Make Data Public

Mandate Data Formats For Maximal Technical Access

Provide Comprehensive And Appropriate Formats For Varied Uses

Remove Restrictions For Accessing Information

Mandate Data Be Explicitly License-Free

Charge Data-Creating Agencies With Recommending An Appropriate Citation Form

CKAN-- the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network -- is open source software powering open data platforms across the world. Provided by the Open Knowledge Foundation in the UK, CKAN is used at the local, regional, national, and international levels of government as well as in academia.

DKAN is a Drupal-based implementation of CKAN that offers an easier installation and support burden while preserving API compatibility.

OpenDataCatalog (ODC) is open source software originally created by Azavea for the city of Philadelphia.

Socrata is the most popular commercial data platform provider in the United States. Socrata offers a turnkey SaaS cloud-hosted data catalog, paid for on a subscription basis. The Socrata platform includes API abilities and sitewide analytics that track consumption and engagement metrics. Socrata is used by dozens of municipal governments, including Baltimore, Austin, Chicago, Seattle, and New York City.

Step 3 Ensure Data Protection Laws are Adhered toStep 4 Associate Data with an Open LicenseStep 5 Publish Data as 3- to 5-star Open Data *Publish data on the Web under an Open License ** Publish data in a machine-readable, structured format *** Publish data in a non-proprietary format **** Use URIs to identify things, so that people can point at your stuff ***** Link your data to other data to provide context

[Machine-Readable and Non-Proprietary Data Formats]

Step 6 Associate Data with Standardised MetadataStep 7 Use Data StandardsStep 8 Use Unique IdentifiersStep 9 Provide Access to the DataStep 10 Publish Data on the National Open Data Portal...and more resources:"Open Government - Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice" by Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma"Open Data Guidebook" by City of Philadelphia"Open Source for Government" by Ben Balter"Open Government Briefing Guide" by Open AustinDisclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer. -Fumi Yamazaki